Invited Talk

Reflections on 50 years of working with CS undergraduatesAndries van
Dam
Brown University

In this talk, I will discuss my work with undergraduate students as
teaching and research assistants (TAs and RAs) since the mid-1960s. I
first did research myself as an undergraduate in engineering, and then, as
a beginning grad student, I discovered Computer Science -- in the early
60's, a brand new field. Indeed it was so new that almost everything we
learned or worked on was research. As a lark, in 1962 I taught high school
students and their teachers about computers and programming in a summer
course I designed, and fell in love with teaching, deciding to go into
academia rather than industry.

When I came to Brown, CS was just getting started as a track within
Applied Math, and there were no grad students in CS. I started working
with Applied Math and Engineering undergraduates who at least had some
programming experience. Those undergraduates were both my TAs and worked
with me on my research projects as RAs. At that time it was radical, even
frowned upon, to use undergraduates in either TA or RA capacity, but my
"farm club"
system of involving undergraduates in active, hands-on, learning by doing
has been adopted over the years by our entire CS department, and more than
40 of my former undergraduate TAs and RAs have gone into teaching of one
sort or another; others have helped start and lead companies. All these
high achievers got an early start at teaching and doing independent
research.